Free Stories 2015

by Baen Books

  She was a middle-aged bottle blonde with cheeks stretched so tight by cosmetic surgery that they looked like translucent pink cellophane. Her clothes looked expensive.

  I said, “Second ground rule. No questions about crackpot conspiracy theories or about Mr. Shade’s personal life.”

  She frowned so hard at the implied criticism of the media’s mischaracterizations of Shade that I was afraid her cheeks would split.

  Back in the days when she had the looks that made her on-air talent, she was the first one who cocked an eyebrow and called Shade “Secretive recluse P. Robin Shade.”

  I suppose she had demonized Shade because calling him a smart, hardworking guy who owned a three bedroom ranch downwind from the sugar beet processing plant in a small town wouldn’t make him sound like a super villain who lived inside a hollowed out volcano.

  There was nothing like making the world a better place to make people assume you must be up to no good. After fifty years, Shade had wearied of the mistaken assumptions and of the conspiracy paparazzi. So we invited the network head here to see for herself the reality of the conspiracy myths that she had started and that her industry had perpetuated.

  Although the main reason for this get together was to ask her and the other institutions represented by these five prominent world citizens to finally pull together. Shade had finally conceded that saving the world was a job too big for us to continue alone.

  I said, “And no questions about how much Prometheus and Mr. Shade are worth. Private corporation, private citizen. Both pay their taxes in full and on time, and do good work with what’s left over.”

  The media had ranked Shade the world’s richest man, at two to four times more than whoever came second, for forty years running.

  The cardinal sent by the Vatican steepled pudgy fingers, “Sir, speaking myself as a man of God knowledgeable of Earthly business I believe you understate Mr. Shade’s good works.”

  He pronounced “Knowledegable” “No-lee-zha-bell.” He was an Italian so plump that his overstuffed red cassock bulged. He served on the Committee of Cardinals who oversaw the Vatican Bank.

  He said, “I have studied the published statements of the Prometheus philanthropies myself, and it is by research possible to estimate the value of Mr. Shade’s investments, that fund these charities. I calculate that Mr. Shade gifts back to the world each year virtually every dollar he earns.”

  Maybe his Eminence got inside info from his ultimate boss, because his calculation was dead close. Although we had trouble giving our earnings away fast enough. Fusion power was just the beginning. Over the decades Shade refined his ability to spot and invest in the next big thing, and to predict and avoid the next bad thing.

  And the money we made then gave away had to date cured a dozen forms of cancer. We had started with pancreatic. The money also fed much of sub-Saharan Africa, and was rebuilding half of Tibet and Nepal after the 2018 quake.

  The cardinal inclined his head so far that I thought his beanie would fall off. “The Holy Father himself wishes me to extend his thanks and his blessing, on behalf of all those everywhere, of all faiths, who have benefited from Mr. Shade’s generosity.”

  Another reason Shade wanted to have this meeting was that his generosity may have been enough for the Holy Father, but it wasn’t enough for everybody. Today the media didn’t just call Shade a reclusive eccentric. Now he was also the Early Robin That Catches the Worm, the Nostradamus of Northwest Ohio, the Man With the Golden Gut. Everybody wanted not only his generosity but his advice, and if he spent his energy giving the latter, he couldn’t earn the profits that funded the former. People needed to understand that and leave him alone.

  The network blonde squirmed in her chair. “Mr. Trueman, this is all fascinating. And all of us do feel a bit like we’ve won the golden tickets to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, but –”

  It had been her job to reduce complexities to pop cultural references. With a twinkle in her eye that kept viewers tuned through the commercial.

  I smiled at that one, myself. “But you think it’s time the tour moves on?”

  I nodded, slapped my palms on my thighs, and stood. “We’ll cover other ground rules if they come up.”

  Once I led them into the hallway, I pointed at the double doors at the opposite end. “Mr. Shade’s office is just down the hall.”

  The network blonde pouted as her stilettos clicked on our ancient but serviceable linoleum. “What? No Wonkavator?”

  Everyone chuckled. Except for me.

  I made this short walk each day on heavy legs. For these five smiling representatives of mankind, the Wonkavator of giddy anticipation was about to take a cruel turn down a dark tunnel.

  I paused when I reached the double doors and rested my weight on the door handles, head down, with my back to the guests. “I should tell you that Mr. Shade’s health is — has been — poor.”

  The double-doored room had been MacRoy’s executive dining room, and the existing plumbing and kitchen facilities had made it a practical conversion to accommodate Shade.

  I rapped my knuckles on the mahogany, then pushed the doors inward and stood aside.

  All of them gasped.

  I ground my teeth. I should have prepared them better. But after all the years I suppose my heart saw Shade as the man I knew, even though my eyes saw the truth every day.

  The cardinal muttered and crossed himself. The network blonde stepped back, rolled an ankle, and jostled the Manco executive’s bodyguard. Six mouths hung open and twelve eyes stared.

  Shade sat silhouetted against the darkened floor to ceiling windows in the center of the plain and oversized room. We had set up a semicircle of six armchairs in front of him. But mankind’s representatives weren’t looking at the room or the chairs.

  I wonder often whether Shade, who had told me that his genius was simply perceiving the obvious, had perceived in 1970 that such fine motor coordination trivialities as spilling a few peanuts, and fingers and lips that trembled, signaled the onset of Amyotropic Lateral Sclerosis.

  Or whether Shade was as shocked as I was when his increasing weakness finally brought the diagnosis that Lou Gehrig and Stephen Hawking and Prometheus Robin Shade had more in common than unsought fame and unrequited optimism.

  The doctors say it wouldn’t have mattered if they or Shade had seen it coming, because mankind hadn’t devised a cure. When we had focused on diseases to cure first, we didn’t choose ALS because it affected fewer people than so many other diseases. It was a small irony.

  The large irony was that, like his namesake Prometheus, Shade’s reward for gifting mankind with limitless fire was to be chained for eternity. Shade, unlike Prometheus, did not regrow his liver each night so that the eagle of Zeus could eat it each day.

  But as I watched Shade weaken each day, and as I saw his guests’ reaction on this day as Shade the omnipotent man of mystery finally sat before them, I wondered whether the gods had been kinder to Prometheus than life had been to Prometheus Robin Shade.

  Truly, Shade did not sit. He was propped.

  The withered bundle of bone and tissue that remained of his body was each day wrapped by his nurse and me into a business suit, crisp white shirt, and tie.

  Yes, the world’s richest man and most improbable optimist got up and went to work every day, just like you did in your electric runabout, the runabout that Shade’s perceptiveness and daring allowed you to drive for a song. The difference was that Shade’s commute was thirty feet, and his clothes were tailored. But he only let me have them tailored for him when I could no longer buy them off the rack in sizes small enough to fit him.

  Then each day his nurse and I placed the bundle in the powered chair that imprisoned the body that imprisoned Shade’s mind. So that Shade’s eyes and ears could let him be part of the world that he had remade, as he read and watched a hundred and twelve closed-captioned flat screen monitors arrayed on his office wall.

  Shade stared at his guests through
eyes set deep in a drawn, pale face canted to one side. The chair periodically metronomed his cradled head slowly side to side, exercising atrophied neck muscles Shade could no longer control, but it was a false animation. He could twitch his cheek muscles and blink but do little else.

  Shade’s eyes stared at his guests through a clear but flickering panel suspended from his chair, that was the size of a computer monitor screen, that moved with his head, and replaced his eyeglasses.

  “I apologize for my appearance. I don’t get out much, for obvious reasons. Trueman, there, picks out my clothes and dresses me funny. Overpriced and understyled. But what do you expect from a lawyer who lives in Findlay, Ohio?”

  I smiled.

  But his guests filed into the semicircled chairs, sat and stared at him stiffly. His electronic voice didn’t disarm them any more than his attempted icebreaker, though self-deprecating jokes about overpriced lawyers and small town disfashion were usually money in the bank.

  Shade manipulated his computer-created voice by twitches he made in his cheek muscles, which optical sensors atop the screen above his face matched to an electronic dictionary of familiar phrases, words, letters, numbers, and punctuation as they flickered across the screen.

  If Shade’s guests found this conversation awkward, they should have been here a few years before. In those days, when Shade could no longer speak or write or type or even point or nod, I would sit in front of him holding a board on which were displayed phrases, words and symbols. I went through them with a pointer as he blinked. One blink meant “No, next,” two blinks meant “Yes, that’s it.” Composing a paragraph could take an hour. It was so exhausting for him that I pointed periodically at “I quit,” to give him an out.

  But we didn’t quit. Because, in the way that a sightless person hears more acutely than a sighted one, Shade’s ability to, as he put it, perceive the obvious grew as the distractions that the rest of us suffer from our physicality shrank for him. He read, absorbed, analyzed. We invested accordingly. And from those investments we made, then gave away, so much money that the Pope sent us human valentines, like this overstuffed cardinal.

  In fact, Shade had only invoked “I quit” once.

  It was after an overlong point-and-blink that merely determined that Shade wanted to dump our small position in KonigsAir, a Swedish aircraft manufacturer. KonigsAir had recently rolled out a biz jet called the Drake, sort of the JetStar’s pussified great nephew. Shade had just made the point to me that he thought the Drake’s fuel system incorporated a fault that might delay certification.

  I had looked at my watch. “It’s Carol the nurse’s wedding anniversary and we’re keeping her late, Shade.” I had pointed to “I quit,” and Shade blinked twice for “yes.” I sent Carol home, then put Shade to bed myself and tucked him in.

  The next morning, Shade didn’t respond to anything I pointed to.

  Finally, I turned away from him and stared at the silent monitors behind us.

  All the networks carried stills and video of a test-flown KonigsAir Drake bursting into flame, then tumbling like a meteor onto a day care center outside Stockholm. Above the crawl were photos of twenty-three infants, each black bordered.

  When I turned back to Shade, a single tear ran down his cheek. I pointed and he blinked until he had said, “I could have saved them.” Then he wouldn’t respond.

  Each day for the next six Carol and I dressed him and propped him up like always but he wouldn’t respond. He tried to choke himself on what Carol fed him.

  Finally, I threw the board and the pointer on the floor in front of him. “Dammit, Shade! Not even God can make the world perfect. And you’re not him. You make the world better. Settle for that.”

  Then I stared out the window at Findlay, Ohio, for a half hour. When I picked the board up, I said, “I’m sorry,” then pointed at “Do you want to continue?”

  He blinked twice for yes, and I never saw him cry again.

  Motionless, Shade said to his guests, “I understand your discomfort at my appearance and limitations. Therefore, I’ll be brief. If the Prometheus prototype were today, in 2020, still in the Libyan sand, we would not be out of oil. We would, however, have been told decade-in and decade-out by various of the institutions all of you represent that we would be out. Not because it was true but in order to advance other agendas. Nor would the Earth have been ruined by industry, or blown to bits by nuclear weapons. Nor would it have suffered the onset of so many other terrible self-evident truths that were not true at all. But today all those awful possibilities do still remain.”

  The ManCo CEO, who had previously served two terms as President of the United States, which is why she had a Secret Service bodyguard – I told you I’d get back to that – wrinkled her forehead. “But Mr. Shade, mankind has done far better than that.”

  “On the contrary. My analysis is that if fusion technology had not been developed, Khaddafi’s expropriation of foreign oil interests in the 1970s would have ignited the greatest transfer of wealth in human history, from the developed nations to the Islamic nations of the Middle East. That in turn would have triggered a cycle of revolution and violence that would have shaped much of the history of the next fifty years. And that cycle would have continued until and beyond this day.”

  Shade paused. We had literally worked him out for weeks before this day, so he would be physically strong enough to sustain this conversation. But the effort was still wearing him down.

  His disembodied voice continued, “But, even though mankind won the cosmic lottery, we’ve done scarcely better at all. All those other problems are still with us, despite limitless clean energy that should have allowed us to solve so many of them. I am weary of working alone. My hope today in bringing us all together is that at last we begin to solve mankind’s problems cooperatively.”

  The Hollywood activist pumped his fist. “Well said! Our environmental groups work selflessly to make a better world.” He waved at the other four guests, “But these entrenched institutions fight us every inch.”

  The Secretary General of the United Nations rolled his eyes at that. “Selfless? You save whales only so they may look graceful alongside your yacht. You adopt babies of color like pretty pocketbooks. Then have them raised by your house darkies.”

  The cardinal scolded the Secretary General with a chubby finger. “Sir, you cast stones? Your organization could be the hope of the world’s children. But you test the developed nations’ generosity scolding them. While you weep at genocide and corruption in lesser lands whose brief you nonetheless carry.”

  The fake-cheeked newscaster snorted at the cardinal. “Hope? You hypocritical tub-of-lard! Organized religion manufactured hell. Then you started charging for life preservers to stay out of hell and called that hope. The only hope the world’s children get from you people is the hope that you won’t rape them like goats.”

  The ex-president sniffed at the network president. “Really, Maureen! How often did my administration endure that same kind of hyperbole and crisis-of-the-week vitriol from your network? While your network’s so-called comedians mocked and scuttled every serious initiative my people or even my opponents ever floated. And you short-covered hard news,” the ex-President pointed at the Hollywood activist, “So you could run puff pieces about these phonies’ diets.”

  “Phonies?” The Hollywood activist came out of his chair, fists balled, and stepped toward the ex-president.

  The Secret Service Amazon came out of her corner like Rocky Balboa, with a hand inside her blazer, and the Hollywood actor plopped back into his chair.

  But the actor pointed at the President-turned-CEO. “Phony? You doubled the deficit and unemployment, then claimed that was prosperity. You gutted the EPA and now you clear sixty million a year fronting for environmental rapists. You started two illegal wars and now you’re campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize.”

  I looked away from the icons of modern civilization while they argued, one insult short of a street brawl
. Then I stepped over to Shade and pulled the old message board out of the pocket in his chair, so we could converse privately, if less fluently.

  “Shade, I know you’re tired. I know the hopes you had for this day. But this mess is their fault, not yours.”

  “Hopeless. Worthless.”

  I buzzed the security guy by the elevator and he and the Secret Service amazon herded the bickering quintet out.

  I closed the doors, locked them, turned to Shade. He stared at me as the chair wagged his head slowly.

  I didn’t turn the voice back on and we did it the old, face-to-face way. It was more personal. One blink meant “no,” two blinks meant “yes.”

  I said, “I understand. We thought oil was the root of mankind’s problems. But now we know that the only self-evident truth is that mankind is its own worst enemy. We’ve busted our asses for fifty years but the human race is still run by self-absorbed hypocrites who choose their own facts and feather their own nests. So you want to give up?”

  He blinked, then blinked again. Twice for yes.

  I looked down at the carpet, back up at him. “And the pain. It’s worse for you every day?”

  Again he blinked, then blinked again for yes.

  After the KonigsAir thing, Shade had asked me to amend his Living Will. Now a syringe was locked in a drawer in Carol’s desk for which I carried the only key. I was authorized, in fact had promised Shade, to use the syringe if he asked. In Ohio it was still manslaughter for me, but I had promised anyway because I owed him that after all we had been through together.

  I took a deep breath, fingered the cold metal key in my pocket, then asked the question Shade’s will required. “Do you want to continue?”

  He blinked once. My heart skipped.

  My tears choked me as I whispered, “But Shade, I can’t continue trying alone. Besides, then I’ll have nobody to dress funny.”

  And then he blinked the second time.

  New Moon Wolf

  by David B. Coe

  The silence between my dad and me drowned out the rumble of the pickup’s engine and the crunch of gravel and sand beneath our tires. He rocked in his seat with the bouncing of the truck, his sun-spotted hands resting on his thighs, hot wind from the open window tousling his white hair. His eyes, the same shade of gray as mine, but glassy, were trained on the washboarded track before us. I wondered how much of what he saw actually reached him.